Dir - Richard Bates Jr.
Overall: MEH
A debut from Virginia native Richard Bates Jr, Excision is a tad jumbled, but also a near success as a bit of adolescent, hormone-ridden, mania horror. With AnnaLynne McCord's Pauline, writer/director Bates has concocted a forcefully bizarre protagonist that challenges the viewer's empathy for her at each and every turn. This is a rather extreme take on the disturbed teenager being unable to relate to her parents and her peers story and as Pauline is haunted/tantalized by disgustingly erotic dreams while she self-diagnoses herself, talks to god, and grows more and more fascinated by her menstrual cycle and human anatomy, everything rather escalates uncomfortably. To watch a film like this, Bates is very much challenging you to endure it and the "body horror" tags the movie has garnished do seem rather appropriate. It is difficult to tell though if the tone issues here are issues at all. The film is absolutely darkly comedic at various times, but it is also highly distressing and it becomes confusing a bit as to how it is supposed to work. Though one could argue here that this may be partly the point in that going through puberty as a mentally deranged teenage girl would certainly be confusing and in this case, also harrowing.
Dir - Ridley Scott
Overall: MEH
If you absolutely have to make a reboot/prequel because Hollywood does not like sinking money into properties that are not already familiar with audiences, you could certainly do worse than Prometheus. Ridley Scott is no doubt an uneven filmmaker, (and by more than one account, rather an asshat), but the guy did make Alien way back in 1979 and anyone who does not consider said film to be one of the best sci-fi horror movies ever made would benefit from having their head examined. To his credit, Scott here insisted on making something that would stand on its own two feet as much as possible and he and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof rather succeed there. Besides the top-notch, H.R. Giger based set design, (which is certainly the film's best quality), Prometheus hardly resembles anything to do with the Alien franchise at least on a surface level. Though these are meritable things, the script itself does not pull off anything all that interesting or unique from the "faith, god, and man" themes we have seen oodles of times by now, not just in science fiction. Also the character's are very poorly if at all fleshed-out with Michael Fassbender's David android the only one coming close to having a well-defined personality when of course ironically he is the least human of them all. If this sounds rather 2001-esque, it is not the only thing that does so, but to be fair, any sci-fi movie that does not try and steal as much as possible from Stanley Kubrick's ultimate masterpiece is doing it wrong.
Dir - Franck Khalfoun
Overall: MEH
Remakes are almost exclusively a lazy idea on principal alone and French genre filmmaker Franck Khalfoun's version of Maniac certainly questions the audience as to why it should exist in the first place. There have been so many Psycho-ripped movies about vicious killers with severe mommy issues that one of the questions begged here is why not just make this an original work separate from its William Lusted-helmed,1980 counterpart? The mannequins had to still be there, one has to assume. Despite its dubious merits as yet another redone horror outing because there clearly are not enough of those, Maniac is completely one-note in its savagery and perversity. It is shot from a POV perspective almost entirely and though the idea is to make the viewer sit squeamishly in the eyes of the title character for the entire ride, spending eighty-nine minutes experiencing what a serial murderer sees and thinks with no breaks cannot really be described as being "enjoyable". There is absolutely no emotional payoff to be found, making the film feel tediously long before it is over. Ergo, it is then left to only work from a purely gimmicky standpoint. Whether it does this or not in a engaging fashion still comes down to how many women you can witness being brutally murdered before tuning out.
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